BA400 Unit 3 Operant Selection Paper Example

Marcus Answers the Door: A BA400 Unit 3 Operant Selection Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA400: Foundations of Behavior Analysis

Unit 3 Operant Selection Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the group home and the resident are composite; every figure is illustrative; the studies and books cited are real.

A Habit Explained by a Trait

Marcus moved into our group home a little over a year ago, and I have supported him on most weekday evenings since. Marcus, 34, has Down syndrome and lived with his parents until last year. Within a few months of moving in, he began running to the front door whenever the doorbell rang and greeting each visitor, whether a nurse, a delivery driver or another resident's family, with a long hug. Some visitors laughed and hugged back; others were startled. A delivery driver complained to the house manager.

When staff talked about it, the explanation was always the same: Marcus is just friendly. That explanation is kind, but it does not explain why the behavior started after he moved, why it grew, or why it happens with the doorbell and not with people he meets on outings. Operant analysis offers a different account.

Operant Behavior and Its Selection

Thorndike (1898) observed cats escaping from puzzle boxes and reported that responses followed by satisfying consequences became more likely, while those followed by discomfort became less likely. His law of effect laid the groundwork for later study of how consequences shape behavior.

Skinner (1953) developed this into the analysis of operant behavior: behavior that operates on the environment and is shaped and maintained by its consequences. An operant is defined not by its exact form but by its effect. Running to the door and hugging are part of one operant if they produce the same consequence. Skinner described the relation among an antecedent, a behavior and a consequence as the three-term contingency, the basic unit for understanding why operant behavior occurs. He later argued that consequences select behavior in the way natural selection selects features of species (Skinner, 1981).

What the Data Showed

At the suggestion of the agency's behavior specialist, staff recorded every doorbell ring for two weeks, noting who was at the door, what Marcus did and what happened next. The doorbell rang 46 times. Marcus ran to the door 41 times. In 33 of those, the visitor hugged him back, talked with him or laughed, and the interaction lasted about a minute on average. In the 8 cases when the visitor stepped back or ignored him, he returned to his room quickly. On the five occasions he did not go to the door, he was in the shower or asleep.

The doorbell was the antecedent, running and hugging were the behavior, and a minute of a visitor's warm attention was the consequence.

The data describe a three-term contingency. The antecedent, the doorbell, signals that a visitor is coming. The behavior, running to the door and hugging, is followed by a consequence, attention from a new person, on most occasions. The pattern suggests that attention is functioning as a positive reinforcer for the door greeting, though confirming that would require showing that the behavior decreases when attention no longer follows it and returns when attention does.

Why It Started After the Move

The analysis also helps explain the timing. At his parents' home, Marcus had few visitors and constant attention from family. At the group home, staff divide their attention among four residents, and visitors are frequent. The move created two conditions: less attention from familiar people, and frequent opportunities to obtain attention from new ones. When a behavior that happened to produce attention, perhaps an early greeting at the door, was followed by a warm reaction, the consequence selected it, and it became more frequent and more elaborate.

What the Analysis Suggests

An operant account shifts attention from Marcus's personality to the contingency. It suggests that if visitors' attention maintains the behavior, two kinds of change could help. First, staff could provide more attention at other times, so that the doorbell is not his best chance for social contact. Second, Marcus could learn a different behavior at the door that still produces attention but is more appropriate, such as waving and saying hello from the hallway, with visitors and staff responding warmly to that instead.

The behavior specialist designed a plan along those lines. Staff began scheduling short one-to-one conversations with Marcus several times a day. He practiced a greeting routine with staff playing visitors, and staff asked regular visitors to respond warmly to a wave and less to a hug. Over the next month, hugs at the door fell from most visits to a few, and Marcus began waving from the hallway on most occasions.

Limits of the Analysis

Descriptive data have limits. Recording what happened before and after a behavior shows correlation, not proof that the consequence maintains the behavior. Other explanations are possible. The doorbell itself might be exciting for Marcus regardless of who is there, or hugging might be reinforcing because of the physical contact rather than the attention. The eight occasions when visitors stepped back, and Marcus quickly left, fit the attention account, but eight cases are too few to be sure.

A functional analysis, in which a behavior specialist briefly and safely tests conditions such as attention, access to items and alone time, would provide stronger evidence. The agency judged that the behavior was not dangerous enough to justify a formal analysis and chose to treat the descriptive data as a working hypothesis. If the plan had failed, that hypothesis would have been the first thing to revisit.

Why the Distinction Matters

The trait explanation and the operant explanation lead to different actions. If Marcus hugs because he is friendly, nothing can be done except ask visitors to tolerate it or tell Marcus to stop. If the behavior is selected by attention, the environment can be arranged to select a different behavior that serves the same purpose. The operant analysis also respects Marcus: it treats his desire for contact as legitimate and looks for a better way to meet it.

Conclusion

Marcus's door greetings are an operant behavior selected by its consequences. Thorndike's law of effect and Skinner's three-term contingency explain how a doorbell, a run to the door and a visitor's attention form a unit of behavior, and why it emerged after his move. Two weeks of data turned a story about personality into a pattern that could be changed, while keeping the friendliness that everyone values.

References

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. Macmillan.

Skinner, B. F. (1981). Selection by consequences. Science, 213(4507), 501-504. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7244649

Thorndike, E. L. (1898). Animal intelligence: An experimental study of the associative processes in animals. The Psychological Review: Monograph Supplements, 2(4), i-109. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092987